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Tag Archives | Polaroids

The TV series House of Lies is about business but it could as easily be about government and foreign policy.

In a recent episode, one of the management consultants pitches a company about the need to launch a new product. She recounts the story of the Polaroid Company known as the Apple of its day, widely admired for the cool design of its instant cameras.

When I lived in Cambridge, Mass., Polaroid was one of the town’s biggest employers, an economic powerhouse.

But soon it was gone. It failed to see new competitive products on the horizon. It only saw the future as its past.

It went bankrupt.

That seems to be the case of our own bankrupt foreign policy that operates with a limited playbook, of negative “options” build around threats, warnings, covert actions and military adventures.

The gap between what we say and what we do has become a chasm, a paper tiger in words first coined by Chairman Mao.… Read the rest

Extrasensory abilities, or hoax? The University of Maryland has a retrospective on the work of Ted Serios, an alcoholic bellhop who, though intense concentration, could produce dreamlike “mind photos” using a Polaroid camera. The Chronicle of Higher Education is a believer:

Strange as it may seem, such “thought” photographs do exist, and a selection of them are on display in an exhibition through March 27 at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

“Psychic Projections/Photographic Impressions: Paranormal Photographs from the Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios” features a series of images produced by Theodore Judd Serios (1918-2006), a bellhop from Chicago who appeared to possess a genuinely uncanny ability. By holding a Polaroid camera and focusing on the lens very intently, he was able to produce dreamlike pictures of his thoughts on the film; he referred to these images as “thoughtographs,” and many striking examples are on display in the exhibition.